Books by Francesca Modini
Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture
Greek Culture in the Roman World (CUP), 2025
This book is the first study of the persistence and significance of ancient lyric in imperial Gre... more This book is the first study of the persistence and significance of ancient lyric in imperial Greek culture. Redefining lyric reception as a phenomenon ranging from textual engagement with ancient poems to the appropriation of song traditions, Francesca Modini reconsiders the view of imperial culture (paideia) as dominated by Homer and fifth-century Attic literature. She argues that textual knowledge of lyric allowed imperial writers to show a more sophisticated level of paideia, and her analysis further reveals how lyric traditions mobilised distinctive discourses of self-fashioning, local identity, community-making and power crucial for Greeks under Rome. This is most evident in the works of Aelius Aristides, who reconfigured ancient lyric to shape his rhetorical persona and enhance his speeches to imperial communities. Exploring Aristides' lyric poetics also changes how we interpret his reconstruction of the classical tradition and his involvement in the complex politics of the Empire.
Publications by Francesca Modini
Soundtracks of Milesian Identity: Timotheus and Imperial Musicians from Miletus
Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 2024
This paper brings attention, for the first time, to the role of musical performances as a site fo... more This paper brings attention, for the first time, to the role of musical performances as a site for the preservation, expression, and revival of local Greek identity under Rome. The evidence analysed consists primarily of two inscriptions celebrating some second- and third-century AD Milesian musicians involved in different reperformances of Timotheus of Miletus. While previous analyses have discussed these texts as sources for ancient reperformance practices, I investigate why and to what effect these musicians included Timotheus in their repertoire. My hypothesis is that their interest in Timotheus, who was by no means a standard model of classicism in the imperial period, was stimulated by his local relevance. Reperforming Timotheus was a means for imperial Milesians to re-enact their artistic past and to showcase the distinctive cultural identity of their community, at a time when Miletus faced the competition of other centres in the province of Asia as well as imperial centralisation.
The Classical Quarterly, 2023
This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classica... more This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classical poetry in imperial rhetorical texts. It argues that references to ancient poems and poets in the works of imperial sophists are always already the product of appropriation and rewriting, and that the study of sophists’ engagement with poetry should go beyond Quellenforschung to explore how and why poetic models were transformed in light of their new rhetorical and imperial contexts. To illustrate this approach and its contribution to our understanding of both ancient-reception phenomena and imperial rhetorical culture, the article focusses on Himerius of Athens, a fourth-century c.e. sophist and teacher of rhetoric whose fondness for lyric poetry has caused his Orations to be used as a quarry for lyric fragments and testimonia. Himerius’ treatment of carefully chosen lyric models is here discussed with attention to his self-presentation and rhetorical agenda to show how the sophist app...
The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, 2020
The Cyclops’ Revenge Aelius Aristides on Plato, Philoxenus, and New Music
Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 2019
Taking issue with the Gorgias and its dismissal of fifth-century Athenian rhetoricians and states... more Taking issue with the Gorgias and its dismissal of fifth-century Athenian rhetoricians and statesmen, in his Reply to Plato in Defence of the Four (Or. 3) the imperial sophist Aelius Aristides finds himself dealing with Plato’s condemnation of New Music, which in the Gorgias had gone hand in hand with the censure of rhetoric. In a brilliant display of new musical ‘revisionism’ so far ignored by scholars, Aristides presents in a positive light the notorious new dithyrambist Philoxenus of Cythera, so that Plato’s influential criticism of New Music, and especially of its political implications, backfires. This paper provides a close analysis of Aristides’ new musical discussion, concentrating both on the sophist’s engagement with Platonic musical critique and on his use of anecdotal traditions about Philoxenus circulating under the Empire. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the history of New Music and its ancient, not always predictable, reception.
Fragments of War: Pindar’s Fragmentary Poetry between the Persian Wars and World War II
Literary Imagination , 2018
Fragmentariness is a well-known obstacle to the reconstruction and study of a genre such as ancie... more Fragmentariness is a well-known obstacle to the reconstruction and study of a genre such as ancient Greek lyric poetry. But what is the impact of the fragmented status of a poetic text on its later receptions? This article is a case study in how even extreme fragmentariness, rather than undermine it, can in fact add to the poetic force of a lyric text. My focus is on two very short fragments ascribed to the same poem on war and civil conflict by the classical melic poet Pindar. Their sensitive topic and, most of all, their highly fragmentary condition appear to have enhanced their diffusion among an impressive variety of readers, who from the fifth century bc up to the twentieth century have reinterpreted, reused, and misused these scanty remains of lyric in light of their own, quite different, experiences of war.
Talks by Francesca Modini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRameX-dLzs
As part of Warwick Classics A. G. Leventis Ancient Worlds Day 2021 'Expanding Horizons', Dr Franc... more As part of Warwick Classics A. G. Leventis Ancient Worlds Day 2021 'Expanding Horizons', Dr Francesca Modini discusses how a musical perspective can shed a new light upon Roman Imperial Power, and examines the political significance of music at Rome, especially through the figures of Augustus and Nero, and their associations with music.
Conference abstracts by Francesca Modini
'Othering and the Other: Performing Identity in the Roman Empire'
International Conference, Unive... more 'Othering and the Other: Performing Identity in the Roman Empire'
International Conference, University of Évora
24th - 27th March 2021
The Poetics of War - UCL 17-19 June 2015
Colloquium on the Second Sophistic - Gothenburg 23-25 October 2015
The sophist and/as an eagle. Aelius Aristides' ancient lyric reception
Though characterised by its own distinctive features, Greek literature of Late Antiquity never ab... more Though characterised by its own distinctive features, Greek literature of Late Antiquity never abandoned the 'classicizing' tradition of the previous imperial era, drawing constantly on ancient models and themes. Undoubtedly,
The dependence of imperial rhetoric upon the models offered by lyric poetry has long been recogni... more The dependence of imperial rhetoric upon the models offered by lyric poetry has long been recognised. Yet scholars have generally stressed the continuity of aims and forms between the ancient poetry of praise and blame and its later prose successor. Such an approach, however, will inevitably appear weak when we consider the distance separating archaic and classical Greece, in which the lyricists composed their poems, from the Roman Empire, where sophists practiced their art. As one would expect, in 'repeating' the moves of their ancient archetypes imperial rhetoricians had to update them so that they fitted their deeply changed context(s).
Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar, 27-01-17 Cambridge
Musical empires: Aelius Aristides' lyric depiction of Athens and Rome
Department Tea talk, UNC Chapel Hill 08/02/2017
Conference presentation (SCS Meeting - San Diego 3-5 Jan 2019), 2019
The aim of this paper is to investigate the forms and functions of sacred musical performances in... more The aim of this paper is to investigate the forms and functions of sacred musical performances in the classizing culture of the Roman Empire, by singling out two works by the second-century AD sophist Aelius Aristides as fascinating examples of the relation between music and the divine in imperial times. Despite being apparently dominated by rhetoric, Greek literature and culture of the imperial period were far from deaf to poetry, or music. In their dazzling public displays, imperial sophists often recalled and mimicked the heroes of ancient Greek song culture like Terpander and Stesichorus, presenting their orations as prose versions of archaic and classical lyric songs (Power 2010). More to the point, actual songs were still being composed and performed, above all in cult contexts: epigraphical evidence from imperial Greece and Asia Minor points explicitly to hymns and paeans tied to sacred centres such as Epidaurus and Claros (Bowie 2006; Golab 2018). Against this lively and still mainly uncharted background of sacred music, the figure and works of Aelius Aristides stand out as a useful case study to explore both imperial cult music and the echoes left by sacred song traditions in imperial Greek texts: Aristides' engagement with music and song was constantly framed by his deep religious concerns. In particular, for reasons of time, the paper will focus exclusively on two works: Aristides' famous Sacred Tales and his (usually neglected) Eleusinian Oration. Scholars interested in musical performances under the Empire have long been attracted to Sacred Tales 4.31-47, where Aristides describes his first-hand experience as a composer of hymns and director of sacred choral performances at the Asclepieium of Pergamum (Downie 2013). A closer look at the Sacred Tales as a whole, however, suggests that musical performances marked a variety of moments and rituals in the religious life of Aristides and his community (see e.g. HL 1.30; 2.53). Together with the traces left by cult music in other contemporary sources, this evidence will be compared with archaic and classical sacred performances, in order to understand if and how the role of music in sacred contexts changed under the Empire. If imperial cult music may be compared with ancient sacred song traditions, these latter could also be mirrored in sophistic orations: this is the case of Aristides' Eleusinian Oration. Written immediately after a barbarian tribe had attacked and burnt the sanctuary of Eleusis, the speech mourns the age-old mystery centre by evoking an array of ancient songs and singing figures; from the mystic poets Orpheus and Musaeus to Linus' song and the orgiastic choruses performed by the worshippers of Attis (Or. 22.1, 11). When read carefully, the Eleusinian Oration reveals a vivid memory of song traditions rooted in the remotest age of Greek sacred music, precisely at a time when historical changes had begun to jeopardize ancient religion.
CAAS Annual Meeting - Silver Spring MD (10.10-12, 2019)
PhD project by Francesca Modini
Lyric and the Second Sophistic: The Case of Aelius Aristides
This thesis aims at investigating how a Second Sophistic author like Aelius Aristides engaged wit... more This thesis aims at investigating how a Second Sophistic author like Aelius Aristides engaged with the multifaceted tradition of archaic and classical lyric poetry and music. Affinities and similarities between rhetorical texts and specific lyric genres have already been recognised, but the deeper implications of the relationship between ancient lyric and imperial rhetoric for Greek literature and culture under the Empire are yet to be discussed fully. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by focusing on Aristides as a prominent and paradigmatic case study.
Apart from a methodological Introduction and a Conclusion, the main body of the thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the presence of lyric in Greek imperial culture by surveying a series of fields in which lyric appears to have left substantial traces: readership and education; visual representations and local traditions; contemporary lyric performances and the relation between lyric and sophistic performative practice. Chapter 2 discusses Aristides’ apparent fondness for the famous lyric poet Pindar from a new perspective, arguing that, apart from direct quotations and allusions to Pindaric texts, the lyric model influenced more extensively the way in which the imperial sophist shaped his own self-presentation. Pindaric poetry is also at the core of Chapter 3, where Aristides’ Isthmian Oration is read and interpreted alongside the Pindaric tradition of epinician poetry. From the fourth chapter onwards, then, the attention moves to other lyric poets and traditions referred to in Aristides’ corpus. In particular, Chapter 4 deals with Aristides’ uses of archaic political lyric within the context of a political exhortation to imperial Rhodes. Imperial politics is relevant also to Chapter 5, which analyses Aristides’ deployment of musicolyric imagery in his representation of the cultural and political capital cities of the Empire, Athens and Rome. Finally, Chapter 6 tackles the issues of Aristides’ constructions of the Greek past by studying his recourse to age-old song traditions alongside his reception of the ‘modern’ lyric production of late classical New Music.
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Books by Francesca Modini
Publications by Francesca Modini
Talks by Francesca Modini
Conference abstracts by Francesca Modini
International Conference, University of Évora
24th - 27th March 2021
PhD project by Francesca Modini
Apart from a methodological Introduction and a Conclusion, the main body of the thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the presence of lyric in Greek imperial culture by surveying a series of fields in which lyric appears to have left substantial traces: readership and education; visual representations and local traditions; contemporary lyric performances and the relation between lyric and sophistic performative practice. Chapter 2 discusses Aristides’ apparent fondness for the famous lyric poet Pindar from a new perspective, arguing that, apart from direct quotations and allusions to Pindaric texts, the lyric model influenced more extensively the way in which the imperial sophist shaped his own self-presentation. Pindaric poetry is also at the core of Chapter 3, where Aristides’ Isthmian Oration is read and interpreted alongside the Pindaric tradition of epinician poetry. From the fourth chapter onwards, then, the attention moves to other lyric poets and traditions referred to in Aristides’ corpus. In particular, Chapter 4 deals with Aristides’ uses of archaic political lyric within the context of a political exhortation to imperial Rhodes. Imperial politics is relevant also to Chapter 5, which analyses Aristides’ deployment of musicolyric imagery in his representation of the cultural and political capital cities of the Empire, Athens and Rome. Finally, Chapter 6 tackles the issues of Aristides’ constructions of the Greek past by studying his recourse to age-old song traditions alongside his reception of the ‘modern’ lyric production of late classical New Music.